Behind the fiction

We criticize movie producers for their endless sequels and remakes. Why can't they ever come up with something new? Yet even the best novelists also have difficulty coming up with something new. Time and again novels are based on real events or classic stories such as King Lear or Greek myths.  Or they write about their own lives disguised as somebody else's lives.

The characters in novels so often are not original creations but based upon people authors have known.  Back in 1985 Williams Amos, a British journalist, wrote a book called The Originals: The A-Z of Fiction's Real-Life Characters that still makes fascinating browsing for readers. He identifies who characters in fiction were actually patterned after.

Ring Lardner 

The baseball writer turned short-story writer Ring Lardner, for example, inspired the character Abe North in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown came about because of an incident Chesterton witnessed involving Monsignor John O'Connor and some students.

Ernest Hemingway based many of his characters on people he knew, including so many of the main characters in The Sun Also Rises. His friendships tended to be short-lived because of this practice. Yet other writers, including Ford Madox Ford and John Dos Passos, returned the favor by putting Hemingway in their own fiction.

Allan Pinkerton

The pulp hero Nick Carter was probably based on the famous detective Allan Pinkerton. I read David Lodge's amusing novel Changing Places several months ago without realizing the character Ronald Duck was actually Ronald Reagan in disguise.

A.A. Milne supposedly based his character Eeyore on Sir Owen Seaman, the dour editor of Punch when Milne worked there.

Margaret Mitchell turned her first husband into Rhett Butler. Mario Puzo's Johnny Fontane was, of course, a fictional version of Frank Sinatra. Thomas Berger made Eldridge Cleaver into Brother Valentine in Reinhart's Women.

Mark Twain based Aunt Polly on his own mother, Amos says. As for Huckleberry Finn, he was inspired by Tom Blankenship, the town drunk in Hannibal during Twain's youth.

The William Amos book covers more than 500 pages and lists thousands of fictional characters based on real people. And these are only characters in the most notable works of fiction prior to 1985. An exhaustive current list would go on for thousands of pages.

All this suggests that when fictional characters are memorable it is usually because the real people behind them were also memorable.